Never in the history of the world has a technology advanced so fast since the day ChatGPT was released. In this talk, discuss the evolution of LLMs to AI Agents, and what we should expect in the next few months to years. We also discuss what may go wrong as we move to these advanced agentic applications and what companies and people should be aware of the implications of this new technology, so you can stay ahead and prepare for the future.

Claudionor is the Chief AI Officer at Zscaler, where he is chartered with driving the vision and implementation of advanced AI technologies to strengthen the world’s largest security platform and propel Zscaler’s innovation engine forward, an invited Professor for Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing at the ECE Department of Santa Clara University, and a consulting member for the World Economic Forum for AI and AI / Cybersecurity, co-authoring two reports on AI Agents and the state of AI and Cybersecurity.

 

He has been building Copilots/Agents since 2016, and he has built six Copilots/Agents since then.

 

Prior to joining Zscaler, Claudionor served as the Chief AI Officer and SVP of Engineering at Advantest, where he led the development of a Zero Trust private cloud solution tailored for the semiconductor manufacturing market, enabling companies to securely run Machine Learning workloads. Before that, Claudionor was the VP/Fellow of AI and the Head of AI Labs at Palo Alto Networks where he led the charge in AI, AIOps and Neuro-symbolic AI, an advanced form of AI that enables reasoning, learning, and cognitive modeling, to help revolutionize time series analysis tools on a massive scale. Claudionor’s career also includes vital roles in Machine Learning and Deep Learning at Google, where he developed a state-of-the-art Deep Learning technology designed for automatic quantization and model compression which played a pivotal function in the search for subatomic particles at CERN. This work was featured in the cover page of Nature Machine Intelligence in August, 2021.

 

He has held Executive positions at Cadence, Synopsis, and Jasper Design Automation, being responsible for opening Cadence and Jasper Design Automation in South America, beyond being the person who negotiated opening a site for the ACM Programming Contest in the Southern Hemisphere of the planet.

He founded iVision (an IP camera company in Brazil), which was sold to Nansen. He is also known to have opened the first Deep Learning company in Brazil in 2014 (Kunumi). He also invested in Hyperplane in 2021. These last two companies were recently acquired by 2 out of the 3 largest banks in Brazil this year (Bradesco and Nubank, which became in January the third largest bank in Brazil).

Claudionor holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Stanford University and an MBA from Ibmec in Brazil. He earned both his M.Sc in Computer Science and B.S. in Electrical Engineering (summa cum laude) from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.

 

• Has built six copilots and agents since 2016
• 4 exits (iVision, Jasper Design Automation, Kunumi, Hyperplane)
• Created technology at Google in model compression and distillation that enabled CERN to search for subatomic particles with ML models running below 1us. This work appeared in the cover page of Nature ML in August 2021.
• Created the first Deep Learning company in Brazil - Kunumi, that was sold to Bradesco in 2024. Early investor in Hyperplane, which was acquired by Nubank in 2024.
• SVP of Engineering of Jasper Design Automation, which was acquired by Cadence Design Systems, establishing Cadence's presence in the Southern Cone of the globe. This was the highest deal in microelectronics in Brazil in the century.
• Well known in Brazil, since I brought the ACM Programming Contest to the Southern Hemisphere of the planet.